Most people have difficulties recalling the fine details of past complex, realistic activities or events. For instance, one can remember getting from the house to the office, locks the house but cannot recall if they closed all the windows. Similarly, there are patients with advanced memory disorders whose treatment has been under research as scientists strive to improve memory recall capacity (Patel et al., 2020). An efficient way to fulfill this is to use non-invasive techniques to trigger brain stimulation (Pitcher et al., 2021). Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has a coil that generates a magnetic field that triggers specific brain areas.
The magnet is turned on and off in rapid succession, although this generates loud noises which require patients to wear earing plugs. It can be combined with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to treat mental disorders such as depression (Koch et al., 2018). Other conditions that can be fixed with these techniques are chronic pain, eating disorders, migraine, and stroke damage. TMS is effective in memory and learning and improves people’s ability to perform mental tasks, especially those involving discerning visual patterns.
The paper will comprehensively address the application of TMS both in clinical setup and memory enhancement. It will follow the general format of a case study report analysis with complete background information and explain the technical concepts. It will then advance to the fundamental functional mechanism of TMS and how it achieves its results (McClintock et al., 2017). The examination will involve analyzing secondary sources of the vast literature presently available in research journals and other reliable scientific websites.
The findings derived from the research will be related to the current idealized potential areas, further explored in future studies (Gurevitch et al., 2018). Finally, the discussion will expound on the innovative capacity of TMS and how it could transform memory improvement and learning abilities in general.
References
Gurevitch, J., Koricheva, J., Nakagawa, S., & Stewart, G. (2018). Meta-analysis and the science of research synthesis. Nature, 555(7695), 175-182. Web.
Koch, G., Bonnì, S., Pellicciari, M. C., Casula, E. P., Mancini, M., Esposito, R., Ponzo, V., Picazio, S., Di Lorenzo, F., Serra, L., Motta, C., Maiella, M., Marra, C., Cercignani, M., Martorana, A., Caltagirone, C., & Bozzali, M. (2018). Transcranial magnetic stimulation of the precuneus enhances memory and neural activity in prodromal Alzheimer’s disease. NeuroImage, 169, 302–311. Web.
McClintock, S. M., Reti, I. M., Carpenter, L. L., McDonald, W. M., Dubin, M., Taylor, S. F., Cook, I. A., O’Reardon, J., Husain, M. M., Wall, C., Krystal, A. D., Sampson, S. M., Morales, O., Nelson, B. G., Latoussakis, V., George, M. S., Lisanby, S. H., National Network of Depression Centers rTMS Task Group, & American Psychiatric Association Council on Research Task Force on Novel Biomarkers and Treatments (2018). Consensus Recommendations for the Clinical Application of Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) in the Treatment of Depression. The Journal of clinical psychiatry, 79(1), 16cs10905. Web.
Patel, R., Silla, F., Pierce, S., Theule, J., & Girard, T. A. (2020). Cognitive functioning before and after repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS): a quantitative meta-analysis in healthy adults. Neuropsychologia, 141, 107395. Web.
Pitcher, D., Parkin, B., & Walsh, V. (2021). Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and the understanding of behavior. Annual Review of Psychology, 72. Web.